Identity crisis

Do national schools of piano playing still exist in 2025, asks Jessica Duchen – and indeed, has the concept ever really been an accurate one?

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Is there a special sorcery in Seoul? Cunning creativity in Canada? Preternatural pizzazz in Paris? Oh, why do so many great pianists come from this or that country? We even have some in Britain; is there something in the water in Southend-on-Sea?

The matter is much more interesting than that kind of baloney. Broadly speaking, national 'schools' of pianism can be traced back to Beethoven's day or beyond. You might see the Viennese and German approaches as intellectual and self-effacing – music as holy art. In France, jeu perlé (pearly touch) and sleek objectivity appear to have been taught since the 18th century. The Hungarians can seem fiery and elegant, the Italians coolly magisterial and the British ever so terribly nice... Still, in an evermore globalised environment, the notion that particular countries produce more great musicians than others seems, if not irrelevant, then increasingly questionable.

Today’s younger generation of pianists is probably the least nationalistic yet. Seong-Jin Cho, winner of the 2015 Chopin International Competition, has a typically hybrid heritage. He trained in his native South Korea with a teacher who had studied with Leon Fleisher, himself a pupil of Artur Schnabel; his later teachers included Michel Béroff in Paris and, in the US, Kevin Kenner, who had studied in Poland.

‘When I perform, I forget about my nationality,’ Cho says. ‘Off the stage, I’m very Korean, but on stage, I don’t think about it. I can’t define a Korean piano school, because so many great teachers studied abroad. Really, it depends on individual musicians.’